Priscilla Lopez was nominated for a Tony Award in 1976 and won one in 1980.

Photo: Courtesy Of Priscilla Lopez

Priscilla Lopez was nominated for a Tony Award in 1976 and won one...

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Michael Rosen as Alejandro dances with his mother Inez, played by Tony Award-winner Priscilla Lopez, in Matthew Lopez's play "Somewhere," a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts through Feb. 10.

Tony Winner Priscilla Lopez stars as Inez Candelaria, a New York mother struggling to hold her family together in Matthew Lopez's play "Somewhere," a TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts through Feb. 10.

In the prologue of the movie "West Side Story," a fight breaks out in a playground before it's broken up by Officer Krupke. If you've seen the movie, you know the scene, but what you don't know is that if you look very closely, you might see future Tony Award winner Priscilla Lopez as a blue speck in the background.

Lopez, who was 12 at the time, wanted desperately to be an extra in the movie, but she couldn't leave her Brooklyn home in the Fort Greene Projects by herself, so her brother Francisco, older by two years, was her escort. Priscilla was chosen to be an extra, and as an added surprise, so was Francisco, who is quite visible in the finished film as the boy playing basketball.

That Lopez family story is remarkable for two reasons. The first is that it marks the debut of Priscilla Lopez, who would go on to introduce the songs "Nothing" and "What I Did for Love" in the landmark musical "A Chorus Line," and it's the basis of a new play called "Somewhere" written by Matthew Lopez, son of Francisco and nephew of Priscilla.

The Lopez family DNA is deeply entwined in "Somewhere," which opens this weekend in Mountain View under the auspices of TheatreWorks. Priscilla is starring as Inez Candelaria, a tough, Broadway-musical-loving mom, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, struggling to keep her family together in the late 1950s and early '60s. It's a role inspired by her mother, Laura Candelaria Lopez.

"We all become our mothers, don't we?" Lopez says on the phone during a rehearsal break in Palo Alto. "When I say I'm playing my mother, I mean I'm using her gestures, her inflections, her strengths. But let me tell you, I've played a few Latin mothers, and my daughter says, 'You're not playing my abuela (grandmother), you're playing you.' It's true. Sometimes I look in the mirror and there's my mother. Oh. My. God. Well, she always wanted to be onstage."

Like the mother she portrays in the play, Lopez's parents worked multiple jobs to ensure that their daughter was able to take dance and music lessons. When Lopez was nominated for a Tony for "A Chorus Line" in 1976, the post-show Tony party was being held at the hotel where her father worked. So the entire staff was prepared to celebrate a victory for one of their own. Then she lost to "Chorus Line" co-star Carole (now Kelly) Bishop.

"I felt like I had let down the world, failed everybody," Lopez says. "It was probably the worst night of my life. Almost everybody nominated for 'A Chorus Line' won except me and Robert LuPone, who lost to other actors in 'A Chorus Line.' "

But Lopez's parents were able to see their daughter take home the Tony four years later for her role as Harpo Marx in "A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine," directed by Tommy Tune.

Lopez is certain that her parents would love "Somewhere," which is all about family ties refracted through a showbiz-obsessed mother who wants her kids in the movie version of "West Side Story" even as she is being evicted from her Upper West Side building to make way for Lincoln Center.

"Matthew has done such beautiful work with this play," says Lopez, who also starred in the play's world premiere in the fall at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre. "When Matthew was 3, he came to see me in 'A Day in Hollywood,' and I have a picture of him with me backstage holding the rubber chicken I used in the show. That's the day he was bitten. He was Harpo Marx for Halloween that year and later started doing community theater."

Lopez says her nephew was all set to try his hand as an actor in New York, but when he sent his aunt something he'd written, she remembers saying, " 'You have to write. You're a writer! When you write, you are the boss. As an actor, you're a hired hand.' He started writing, and look at him now."

Matthew Lopez had a hit two years ago with "The Whipping Man" at Manhattan Theatre Club, and he's currently a writer on HBO's "The Newsroom."

Since its premiere in San Diego, "Somewhere" (named for the song in "West Side Story") has been streamlined and finely tuned. Priscilla Lopez says it's even better.

"I pray this play will get picked up and go to New York," she says. "It really should."